Barack Obama's inauguration gives anti-Americans pause – for now

I leave the last word on the Obama inauguration to The Modern Parents in that ebullient conservative publication, Viz.

"Barack Obama becoming president isn't going to change anything at all. America will still be the same evil, stupid, racist country it's always been," says Tarquin's mother.

"You mean you want America to be that, so that you can carry on feeling superior," replies her little boy. "You just can't take it that America has elected a black president, when you and your Ethically Aware Support Group friends don't even know any black people".

Cue a barrage of invective from the Ethically Aware Support Group:

"Barack Obama isn't properly black."

"Absolutely. If he was a proper black leader, he'd be getting himself elected as a facilitator of a grass-roots community group in a shanty-town ghetto in Harlem or somewhere, not selling out by joining the rich white establishment in Washington."

"Indeed. Black people should be encouraged to maintain their cultural integrity."

"If Obama was a proper ethically-aware black person, then Americans would never have voted him in. All Americans are racist."

"Yes, and they're all fat."

"And they've forced all their made-up American festivals on us, like Hallowe'en and Christmas."

"Absolutely. Santa Claus was invented by the Coca Cola Corporation."

"The Coca Cola Corporation invented cocaine, too."

"That's right. They tested it on soldiers in Vietnam. That's why they all got Gulf War Syndrome."

"Yeah. And I can't see Obama doing anything about that."

And so on, for two hilarious pages. Viz is surely the most eloquent Rightist publication in Britain. For a quarter of a century, it has savagely paraded our contemporary archetypes across its pages: Student Grant, the whingeing undergraduate; Millie Tant, the ugly and humourless feminist; the pretentious Art Critics. I seem to remember that there even used to be a character called Lennie Left ("He's Right-On"). Viz is the inheritor of the tradition of subversive and satirical Toryism that stretches back to Johnson and Swift.

Regular readers will know that I backed Obama on several grounds, one of which was that he would give anti-Americans pause. It won't be a long pause, of course. Soon enough, the anti-yanquis of the world, from the West Bank of the Jordan to the Left Bank of the Seine, will start canting their old calumnies. But America today is a more popular country than it was last week; and that must be worth something.